“Actual Countries” and “Phony Lines”

In addition to the other problems with Joe Klein’s references to “more accurate” borders, his remark that the U.S. should be “open to nationhood for actual countries in the region” is very confused. It is worthwhile to review what this phrase gets wrong. A group of people can be a nation without being located in a single territory, and the things that distinguish them from other nations are frequently not connected to the land that they currently inhabit. Not all nations have their own states, some never will, and statehood and nationhood are two very different things. States whose boundaries have been established by the legacy of foreign interference and domination are nonetheless real or “actual.”

Something else that Klein gets wrong is that the “actual countries” in the region are the ones that he is saying will be (and should be) broken up. While he says that the U.S. should be “open to nationhood for the actual countries,” what he means is that he thinks the U.S. should accept the dissolution of states that already exist. The “actual countries” that Klein has in mind are, in fact, mostly imagined ones that do not yet exist and probably never will exist.

Elsewhere in his post Klein keeps coming back to this formulation of “actual countries” versus “awkward contraptions” and “phony lines.” The “phony lines” in the Near East are older and better-established than many others, including some of the modern borders in Europe and the former Soviet Union. The lines are no more or less “phony” in other parts of the world, but we usually aren’t quite as quick to dismiss them as such. As a matter of international law and politics, the borders of these states aren’t phony. Some of these states may have an ethnically or religiously diverse population, but unless Klein wants to argue for the Lausanne principle (and I don’t think he does) that doesn’t automatically them any more “awkward” or less “actual” than any other state.

“Not all nations have their own states, some never will, and statehood and nationhood are two very different things.”

The first claim is a correct statement of fact. The second is a prediction about the future which can never be proven correct (short of a reckoning at the end of time). The third claim is misleading, to say the least.

That not all nations have their own states is certainly true. However one defines “nation,” there are surely some cases in which a nation exists without having a state of its own.

Whether all of those nations (however many there are) will ever achieve statehood is something that cannot be determined. History might go on for a very long time, and, perhaps, someday, all of what anyone could reasonably call a nation will, in fact, get states of their own. How the author can confidently state the contrary is unclear. Does he have a crystal ball?

Nationhood and statehood being “two very different things?” I think not. The modern state system is very much tied into nation-states and notions of nationality. The age of empires is over, at least for now. The overwhelming majority of states are, in fact, nation-states, so the two concepts are clearly very closely related. The few exceptions (the city states of Singapore, the Vatican, Monaco, etc, the tiny enclaves of no particular nationality like Andorra, etc) are just that, exceptions. Exceptions that prove the rule. The standard, paradign case of a modern state is a nation state. So, no, statehood and nationhood are not “very different.” The basic rule is that each nation gets a state, and that each state comprises a nation. There are cases in which that rule is not followed (states that are not coterminous with nations, nations without states), but that hardly means the rule has no validity at all.

Finally, none of this is meant to validate anything that Joke Line has to say (indeed, I did not even read the article of his being discussed, and see no reason to , as he is an idiot), but that is no excuse to make false or misleading statemetns.

I don’t know if I’d declare the age of empires dead yet. The US, by any conceivable definition, is an empire even without its overseas client-states. There are several nations within the borders of the US, sometimes even within the borders of a single state, but only one state overseeing them all (the states themselves are becoming more “administrative divisions” than states in their own right).

Russia and India, to name just two, follow a similar model, and for that matter the EU seems to want to become an empire and just hasn’t managed it yet. I’m painting with a broad brush here, granted, but I don’t think I’m equivocating too much. We don’t do empires the exact same way that we used to, but they’re still around.

The US is an informal empire. Its component parts, vassals, whatever you want to call them, are nation states.

Russia and India are nation states, even if they have national minorities inside their borders.

The EU is a collection of nation states.

I stand by what I wrote. The norm is the nation state. You mentioned three states (and one multistate organization), but there are hundreds of states, and the vast majority of them are nations states. Thus, the idea that stathood and nationhood are “very different” is misleading, at best. The existence of a hyperpower hegemon, of large nation states with substantial sub national groups, or of multistate organizations doesn’t change that.

Moreover, you are pursuing a red herring. The primary point is the nation state paradigm. Quibbling about how empirese are “done” these days doesn’t change that. My comment about the age of empires being over, for now, was not central.